My skin started to glow, and I didn’t care. There were no cameras in here. No one else but me and Audrey. I was giving myself this moment to really feel happy for once.

Acing this test was the first step in truly earning my freedom.

“Congratulations.” Audrey pulled me in for a hug for a second before letting me go. “Okay. Okay. You said you’d do it and you did.” She let out a breath, trying to calm down. “We gotta get you in to see Carl as soon as possible. He’s the one to make it happen for real, and we gotta get it done before Jason finds out about any of this. That means tonight.”

The giddy feeling started to drain away along with the glow. “There was some SpaceTech guy that showed up wearing a lot of medals after my test, and it freaked me out.”

“Shit.”

“I know.” It wasn’t a done deal. Not yet. But I was determined to make this happen. “Can you message Ahiga?”

She went to the control panel in her wall in the main area. “Done.” She turned back to me. “Might as well get you an IV. Tyler told me your suit failed again, which I can see from the rose tint on your skin.” She pulled a fluid packet from a drawer under the bed and started placing out her supplies.

“Those suits…” God. I really didn’t ever want to put one on again. Just the idea of it made me want to crawl under the exam table and hide. “Thankfully, I wasn’t far from Bay Four.”

Audrey placed the IV patch on my arm, and I got up to pace.

“The happy smile is gone. You okay?” she asked after a minute.

“Yeah. Just anxious. Every time something good has happened to me recently, something bad follows it. I guess I’m realizing that even if I passed this test, it doesn’t mean that anything will change. It doesn’t mean that mining won’t be hard or just as deadly.” My mind started thinking through every possibility, but even if mining was terrible, I honestly didn’t think it could be worse than icing down the surface.

But what if it was?

“Don’t think that way.” Sometimes Audrey surprised me by how well she could read me, but the last couple of weeks had been intense, and she’d been by my side for all of it.

“I’m trying. I want to believe that—”

A knock came at the door, and Audrey opened it. “Thanks for coming so quickly,” she said.

Ahiga stepped into the room, closing the door behind him. “How’d it go?” He looked almost as nervous as I’d felt this morning.

I handed him my test results.

“Hmmm…” He said as he read them.

“You don’t understand the results either?”